From Hellgatewiki.com

Pre Launch Article
This article contains information that is old, or outdated, but saved for future reference, and a historical overview of Hellgate: London through the course of development of the game. These articles are NOT meant to be updated any further. You can find more articles from before launch here.

Towns in Hellgate: London aren't actually towns, as they are in most RPGs. You won't find gatherings of houses in the middle of a forest or desert, as you do in games such as Diablo II. The "towns" in Hellgate: London are subway stations, magically-protected subterranean refuges from the demon-ravaged surface.

"The stations in the London Underground are safe zones. They act like towns in traditional RPGs. They're always safe and they're always static in design so you don't have to find your way around every time you go there and you always know where the NPCs are to trade with and speak to. In multiplayer games these are common areas where everyone comes to join together. That adds a real community aspect to the game -- you can form and meet up with guilds, trade, by or sell objects with other players, and indulge in all those good community things that you get from traditional MMORPGs."
--Bill Roper, June 2005.

Players use town portal spells and their recall skill to return to the last town they were in, and enter the town their character last logged out from when starting a new game of Hellgate: London.

Annotated List of Stations

See the individual town pages for details about that station, and a list of the NPCs and Quests associated with it.

• Act One Route map.
  • Charring Cross Station
  • Covent Garden Station -- First town entered in Hellgate: London.
  • Embankment Station
  • Green Park Station -- Destroyed by demons.
  • Holborn Station
  • Leicester Square Station
  • Piccadilly Circus Station

Subway Station Layout

The layout of subway stations changed a great deal during the game's development, will continue to evolve until release. Early gameplay movies and screenshots showed quite a bit of the interior of Covent Garden Station and some of the other stations. The architecture still looks the same, but the layouts are all entirely changed around, and they seem to be quite uniform now, to the point of "where am I again?" confusion.

As for the towns themselves, they've all been reorganized. I only reached the first two towns during my play time, but Covent Garden Station and Holborn Station were nearly identical in size and layout. I found them pretty confusing, actually. Check out the minimap version of Covent Garden Station here… see all the portals and exits? The stations are set up in kind of an "H" shape, with subway tracks running down each side and various NPCs in various rooms in the center. Each subway track has portals leading away at each end of it, and there are frequently stairs running up or down in the center of the "H" with more portals or passageways at the end of them. This screenshot shows one side of the Temple station, a town you'll reach about midway through Hellgate: London. You can see the track with the portal at the end, and an NPC in the center. What you can't easily see are the hallways through the middle, which come out on a track that looks exactly like this one; just with different names for the levels that lead off of it.

I'm sure that once we've all played the game for a while we'll have no trouble remembering which areas we've already done, and which portals led to them, but for now, I was lost every time I entered a station. The tracks look just alike, the area names are all similar (literally, you'll often get levels like Upper Kingsway Street, Upper Kingsway Sewers, and Lower Kingsway Sewers all exiting from the same station), and if you get turned around while visiting the NPCs in the center of the "H", you can have a hard time remember which way you came in. This is made worse by the monster respawning, so you can go back to a level you've already been in and not realize it, since your map pops up anew on each area you enter, and the monsters you just killed might all be gone and replaced by fresh walking targets. Look at that minimap of Covent Garden Station. There's a portal at all four ends of the subway tracks, and 3 more inside the station, all up various winding stairways. Remember the names of areas, or you'll wind up doing areas more than once and running in circles.

Even if you manage the portals, you can get lost in the stations! My saddest episode came in Holborn Station after I returned through a town portal, sold loot to the NPC merchant, and then couldn't find my way back to the portal I'd come in through. I knew it was somewhere in the middle of the "H," but there were like 4 paths between the tracks, three NPCs in the center, and the hallways had little dead ends that seemed to be moving around each time I returned to them. I must have run through each hallway three times before I noticed a double turn in one and scooted through it and back through my town portal.
--Flux, Mega Community Day Report, May 2007. (Forum registration required to read full report.)